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AS we wait for the dust to settle after probably the most contentious election in Pakistan, we are being told to accept the result and move on.
I’ll be happy to follow these instructions as soon as I get rid of this bitter taste in my mouth. Don’t get me wrong: I have no skin in the game as I supported none of the three major parties, but was delighted that the MQM and the religious parties met their comeuppance.
There is a delicious irony in the MQM crying foul as Altaf Hussain’s party is widely seen as having rigged past elections in urban Sindh in the most blatant way imaginable. Now that it has met its match, it finds itself much diminished at the national and provincial levels. But hey, who’s complaining?
The received wisdom is that whatever happened before, during and after the elections should be accepted in the national interest. Above all, we should look to the future, and not the past. Amen, brothers and sisters: let’s move on.
The immediate future isn’t looking too bright, even though the rupee has staged a partial recovery against the dollar. But foreign exchange reserves have plummeted, and a begging mission to the IMF is very much on the cards for the next government. Imports far exceed exports, and sooner rather than later, the bill will have to be paid.
A system is only as good as the political will to make it work.
Meanwhile, there are millions of Pakistanis who genuinely feel that a PTI-led coalition won’t represent them as they think (surely wrongly!) that the result is not an accurate reflection of the public will. And there is a smug sense among the well-to-do that ordinary people lack the political maturity to vote for the ‘right’ candidates and parties. However, they are neither too blind, nor too stupid, to see a magic wand at work. But let’s move on.
What I am more concerned about than one mismanaged — if that’s the correct word — election is the widespread impression of institutional collusion to get a certain result. If the next government fails to forge reconciliation across the country, this erosion of respect for two of our most cherished organisations can poison our polity and national cohesion.
An argument is being made that while the conduct of the elections leaves a lot to be desired, the result, despite the bungling, is a rough approximation of the popular mandate. But we’ll never know this for sure, will we? And that’s the point of holding free, fair and transparent elections: the numbers are a precise record of voter preference.
This is where the role of the Election Commission of Pakistan comes in. We are now being told that the long delays in announcing results, even from major urban centres, were caused by the failure of the computerised RTS system recently installed to expedite the transmission of vote summaries. I suppose it would have been too much to expect the ECP commissioners, no doubt IT wizards one and all, to test the system using large volumes of data to make sure it would not collapse under the pressure of real-time transmission.
As far as I know, no heads have rolled at the ECP, or anywhere else for that matter, for this catastrophic failure. I have argued here earlier that elections are administrative, not judicial, exercises that retired judges are not equipped to conduct. In this day and age, we need retired civil servants and police officers with good reputations familiar with the working of the bureaucracy and the police, as well as IT experts on the ECP. By all means have a retired judge to head the commission, but stacking it with retired members of the higher judiciary clearly no longer works.
But a system is only as good as the political will to make it work. If undemocratic forces are determined to subvert it, then obviously they will get their way, even at the cost of bringing the whole edifice crashing down. Anyway, let’s move on.
England is where Imran Khan has spent many years, and is second home for him. He would be disappointed to see the media coverage of the elections there. Newspapers, TV and radio have all dealt at length with the manoeuvring their reporters claim to have witnessed before, during and after the elections. Move on, guys: we can live with a rough approximation of reality.
Over the last few years, whenever English friends have asked me about how Khan is doing in politics, they have been horrified by my response about his views on the blasphemy laws and women’s rights, as well as his apparent sympathy for the Taliban. How this will play out on the global stage remains to be seen.
Given all the problems we face, I would be more than happy to see a period of stability. This means no dharnas, and a political consensus across the spectrum. Somehow, I don’t see this happening. But let’s move on.
Published in Dawn, August 4th, 2018
